


High Noon

by epistolic



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-18
Updated: 2011-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:06:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mirrorverse. <i>"And you know what? One day, showing up just won't be enough. One day, we'll be standing around a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one that put it there."</i> Sherlock/Moriarty. AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	High Noon

Unexpectedly, it did not start with boredom.

Sherlock Holmes, thirty-two, the world’s only consulting detective, based in 221b Baker Street, London, killed a man on the twenty-third of November with a crowbar. He was on a case and the man – no-one interesting, really – got in the way. It was a miscalculation. It was also half curiosity, the little voice that sometimes emerged in Sherlock’s mind – _do you dare, do you dare, do you dare._

After two more hours of dashing about the case was solved, Lestrade was giving him that slanted, appraising look, the river mud was all over Sherlock’s shoes, the sky smelled alive.

Sherlock Holmes breathed it into his lungs. Let it simmer.

And then he turned around and went home.

\--

So it was that Sherlock Holmes alighted from a cab, took the three steps up to 221b, unlocked it, flung his coat over the banister of the stairs, deduced that his landlady was asleep from the scent of over-brewed tea on the landing, ascended the steps in impatient two’s, unbuttoned his jacket and found John asleep in his armchair by the mantel, bad leg gone pliant in forgetfulness, laptop open from some ghastly recounting of Sherlock’s achievements no doubt and Sherlock would sit on the opposite chair and watch him and that would be enough, in some inexplicable way, to tame the momentum in Sherlock’s chest.

So it was that Sherlock Holmes looked up at John Watson with his long hands clasped, elbows on knees, a dead woman’s suitcase at his feet, and said, eyes glittering:

_Oh, perhaps I should mention,_ I _didn’t kill her._

So it was, in another universe perhaps. A better one. In another telling of this story.

\--

It's a bright March morning when Sherlock first gets shot at through the open window of 221b. The bullet misses him, erupts somewhere in the chaos of the kitchen, sets the place on fire.

He loses half the living room and a long scrape of skin over his knuckles. Lestrade makes a fuss and suddenly there are policemen tramping throughout the apartment, forensic teams, picking up Sherlock's used teacups and peering at their charred contents, scraping pieces of paint off the windowsill. Someone unearths Sherlock's collection of human teeth. Exclamations. Assumptions.

Sherlock is livid.

They clear out by lunchtime and Lestrade clasps Sherlock's hand too tightly, narrows his eyes at Sherlock's face. Says goodbye like he's trodding over broken glass. Sherlock makes a noncommittal noise and shuts the door on him. The police cars pull away from the curb and almost immediately Sherlock is upstairs, shutting the curtains, looking about him, at the roomful of mauled evidence, the bullet in the kitchen from someone who wanted Sherlock Holmes caught, who wanted to give the police an excuse.

Sherlock Holmes moves into 221c and starts hunting.

\--

Jim Moriarty is thirty-one, small and compact, like his bones were made to fit into tight corners. He doesn't flinch when Sherlock lures him into a suburban basement before blowing the whole place up. Sherlock hadn't meant to kill him anyway - and Jim makes it out with rubble dust all over his clothes, mouth stretched in a grin that Sherlock can see from a window across the street, lit up and fierce.

Jim looks up and blows Sherlock a kiss and mouths, _I_ will _stop you._

"You'll _try_ ," Sherlock says, then remembers that Jim can't hear him. 

It doesn't matter. The weather outside is cool and crisp and London is slow to stir, the deep blue of the sky almost blinding.

  


\--

Jim is clever, but so is Sherlock. 

There's trap after trap, broken bones, a particularly nasty letter bomb Jim leaves on Sherlock's doorstep, which lands Mrs Hudson in hospital.

"We're two of a kind, aren't we, Sherlock," Jim says, a low slip of a voice down the phone line. "Anyone else might think we're actually trying to kill each other."

"Aren't we?" says Sherlock.

"I'm not," says Jim. "Can't prosecute a dead body."

"Do you actually think you'll manage to get to me," says Sherlock, stretched across a hotel bed somewhere in Whitechapel. 221c Baker Street is still recovering from an alleged gas leak, scooped out of the wall of flats like a giant, gaping maw. "There's nothing to connect me to anything. You can look, if you like. But you should know I'm very thorough in tying up loose ends."

Jim laughs. "Is that what I am in that delectable mind of yours? A loose end? I'm flattered."

"Don't be."

"Everyone leaves traces."

"I don't."

"We should meet up sometime," Jim says, suddenly, and a car backfires outside Sherlock's hotel room. "Have dinner. It's bad form to try and kill someone you've never met in person."

"You're not that interesting," Sherlock says, picturing Jim coming out of that collapsed basement yet again, grey dust in his hair and his buttons shorn off, shirtsleeves torn open, flapping in the London wind. The only threat Sherlock has ever had, and younger than him.

Jim's voice narrows to a hiss. He's angry, now, and for a moment Sherlock sees potential, a flashlight switched on and screaming.

"Now now, Sherlock," Jim Moriarty says, "we both know that's not true."

"Isn't it?" Sherlock says. Smiles at Jim's silence and the taste of victory. "Prove it, then."

  


\--

Oh, Jim proves it. 

  


\--

The first time Jim corners him - _actually_ corners him - is in a back alley street in Fitzrovia. The night is high and the moon is half blacked-out, quivering purple in the space between two rooftops, the bruises on Sherlock's ribs still not healed yet and aching dully beneath his shirt. 

Jim grazes his mouth over Sherlock's neck and, strangely enough, Sherlock lets him.

"Not a single murder in two whole weeks," Jim whispers against the beating time of Sherlock's carotid. "What's the matter? Going off your game?"

"Hardly."

“You’ve been holding back.”

“And you haven’t been trying.”

Sherlock slots his fingers in at the nape of Jim's neck and pulls him in, not close enough to kiss, just close enough to feel the hitch in Jim's breathing against his mouth. 

Jim's eyes are a dark, liquid brown and his brows are tinted. There's a single eyelash on his cheek. 

"Hmm," Jim says after a moment, more an exhalation than anything else. He waits a beat, and then he puts his hands flat over Sherlock's chest, wrinkling the lapels of Sherlock's jacket, pushing himself away. 

The air smells like overheated metal and the curbside glitters from earlier rain. Jim's dark blue suit blends him into the street, white shapes where his hands emerge from his cuffs, the rough, gritty spill of the streetlights along his narrow jaw and halfway across his throat.

"Beautiful night, isn't it," Sherlock says.

Jim’s lovely eyes narrow. “It’s not like you to notice something like that.”

“I’m not entirely without gentler feeling,” Sherlock says, and then he shoots Jim in the chest, the barrel of the gun still warm from the inside of Jim's trouser pocket.

\--

Jim doesn’t die, but then Jim never seems to die. He comes back, sitting on Sherlock’s bed with his legs crossed at the knee, the top button of his shirt undone and showing just a hint of collarbone. 

Sherlock stops halfway over the threshold.

“Gotcha,” Jim says, and he jerks a chin at the timer sitting on Sherlock’s desk. “Pretty careless of you to leave that lying about.”

“I didn’t,” Sherlock says. Then it dawns on him. “That’s not mine.”

“I assure you, the fingerprints all over it are yours.”

Sherlock’s lip twists. Jim pats the mattress next to him, smile curling in the half-dark. Jim’s body is warm when Sherlock crosses the room to sit down beside him. Their shoulders brush.

“You’re lucky I was wearing a vest that time,” Jim says, one hand making an abortive gesture towards his shirt. “Otherwise this could all have come to a very boring end.”

“I did tell you I was going to kill you.”

“But you knew I was wearing that vest.”

Sherlock shrugs. He had known, but that’s beside the point. “You’re not wearing a vest now.”

“I’m not wearing a gun either,” Jim says. He turns his head, eyes glittering for a moment as the bleak light from outside hits them at just the right angle, split-second perfection. His hand slides across the sheets to nudge at Sherlock’s thigh. “So if you’re planning to shoot me, you’ll have to climb out the window and fetch your gun from where I’ve thrown it. Sorry.”

Jim’s fingers are soft; Sherlock looks at him, hard. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve missed you.”

“No, I mean. Why are you trying to stop me.”

“The same reason why _you_ want me to keep trying to stop you,” Jim says. His fingers trail, deceptively casual, to the inseam of Sherlock’s trousers, just above his knee. “Because otherwise there’s no point doing anything, is there? If there’s no-one to catch you at it.”

“I can think of plenty of good reasons.”

“You don’t care for money.” Jim tilts his head. “You’re not inherently cruel. You don’t lust, you don’t envy, you don’t kill out of anger. You want to get _caught_.” Jim leans in, breath soft and shallow, puts his palm flat over Sherlock’s thigh. “And I want to catch you. Would you let me?”

“No,” Sherlock says, eyes dropping to Jim’s mouth. “I wouldn’t.”

Jim huffs out a laugh. Sherlock catches a glimpse of sharp, white teeth, a pale curl in the dark, closing the distance. Jim tastes like fruit and chocolate, like something with all its parts jumbled up.

Sherlock slides his eyes shut and kisses back.

\--

In the morning, Jim sleeps in with his back to Sherlock, all the knobs of his spine leading down down down beneath the sheets. He looks delicate for a moment in the slanting light. But only for a moment. 

They spend the hours before noon in bed, because Sherlock can’t be bothered to move, and it’s his room, anyway, Jim with his arm across his eyes when the sun comes in at an awkward angle through the blinds, caught on dust motes.

“What did you do before I came along?” Sherlock asks, and Jim peeks out at him from under his arm.

“You haven’t done your research?”

“I looked. You’d wiped it.”

“Of course I had,” Jim says, voice slow, lazily content. He shifts a little on the cheap hotel mattress and the point of his shoulder accidentally bumps against Sherlock’s hip. “I taught mathematics. It was at an out-of-the-way university, you don’t need to know the details.”

“I always need to know the details. Did you quit it just for me? Why?”

“I noticed you.”

“Plenty of people notice me,” Sherlock says.

Jim rolls over onto his stomach. “Yes, but they don’t necessarily _see_ you. Or if they do, they push you away because they’re afraid of you. What is it that Sally calls you? Darling Sally.”

Sherlock falls silent, picking absently at a loose thread on the nearest blanket.

“We’re a unique breed, Sherlock,” Jim says eventually, shuffling closer to bite at Sherlock’s ribs. “The only two in the world. Of course I saw you, it was just like looking into a mirror. Couldn’t miss it.”

\--

Sherlock moves back into 221b because there’s no reason not to. Jim always manages to find him.  

Sidling up to him in the middle of the street, threading an arm through Sherlock’s elbow, shirt crinkling, fingers quick and clever from all those bombs. Sitting across from him in the tube. Waiting, those dark eyes flaring up when they connect with Sherlock’s, next in line for a cab. Sherlock’s little ghost, trying to catch him out.

It all goes well, picture-perfect, storybook beginning, until Jim comes for tea at Baker Street and Sherlock’s bank card goes missing. There’s nothing incriminating on it and it’s an amateurish move, something Jim shouldn’t be capable of. 

“I’ll make it up to you,” Jim says a week later over the phone, his voice carefully blank. 

It’s a hot day, the moisture thick in the air and in Sherlock’s lungs. Beads of sweat form at the join of Sherlock’s spine and his skull, something shifting minutely – a tipping balance. The start of a doubt. 

Sherlock looks out of his window at the pavement outside, at the life rushing over it. 

Quiet. Unmoved.

\--

Sherlock Holmes became a consulting detective ( _criminal_ ) because there were limits to what he could tolerate.  

The legwork, he could handle. The constant taste of adrenaline in his mouth, the rush of London air, the smog that hung over the sewers and the mud that Sherlock could distinguish between to the very street. The bullet-wounds, the sting of cold in the early hours. All perfect and necessary. Sherlock stitched a case together and New Scotland Yard swept up the pieces. Sherlock rarely cared for what became of a criminal – death, prison, escape, whatever. It was all so irrelevant.

Sherlock lived for that tiny moment when everything made _sense_. For that single, illuminating second, for high noon, all the celestial spheres aligning for the briefest sliver of time before sliding away again.

As they always did slide away. 

No case repeated twice. No trail repeated twice. Always a different street, leading to another different street, leading to another different street, which had never been led to before. A different way of hiding the body. A different weapon. A different way to make Jim dance, always a step behind.

In another life, Sherlock might have been someone else – but that, too, was a thought that did not bear repeating, one that Sherlock had visited years before and had already discarded, struck out, forgotten, deleted.

\--

And so they fall apart. 

Jim drags him to dinner in the sixth month, a tasteful little Thai restaurant nestled away from the main street. There are silk hangings and the heavy, cloying scent of coconut milk. Jim’s cufflinks glint brightly in the shaded lamps, two neat eyes of onyx, the same pair he wore chasing Sherlock down one autumn afternoon by the Thames. It feels like a lifetime away.

“Are you upset with me,” Jim says.

The blunt approach. Sherlock looks across at him, at the bite mark on Jim’s neck just visible above his collar that Sherlock did not put there. It suits him. The man who gave it to him has a misaligned right upper canine and a slight case of overbite; Sherlock notes this without any trace of resentment.

“Yes,” Sherlock says, not touching his wine. “I am.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I can’t describe it.”

Jim drums his nails across the tabletop, dark eyes sparking. “You’ve spent the last month acting like I’ve disappointed you, and I don’t like that feeling, Sherlock.”

“You’ve had half a year, I’m just getting impatient.”

“Over what? Over me not turning you in?” Jim leans forward, all thirty-one years of him, across the corner table of Pad Thai restaurant with his arms folded onto the blank, scrubbed surface. “You actually want me to hand you over? Because I can do that.”

“No, you can’t. You don’t have enough evidence for a court case.”

“When has this ever been about the court case,” Jim says, a sudden snarling sound. “I can always just kill you.”

“You wouldn’t ever do that, you’ve said it yourself.”

“I’ve said it _once_. But I’m very changeable.”

“How would you kill me, then,” Sherlock says. “Describe the process.”

Jim’s mouth flattens into a taut white line and there’s a long pause and then suddenly it is all so anticlimactic, the candles on the table, Jim’s best tailored suit, the narrow nip of his waist and all that intellect wasted, all that _potential_. Jim Moriarty won’t kill Sherlock Holmes – he doesn’t have it in him. 

Jim sees the moment in Sherlock’s eyes and his mouth twists. “Am I losing your _attention_ , Sherlock?”

“You’re losing my respect.” Sherlock waits, but Jim says nothing, eyes steady. “You’re in love with me.”

“That won’t stop me when the time comes,” Jim snaps.

“Yes, it will.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Can’t I?” says Sherlock, and Jim falls silent. His knuckles are pale where he’s clenched a fist on the table and there’s tension strung through his shoulders, his expression carefully flat. 

This is Jim as an enemy, Sherlock thinks then, suddenly, trying to parse out the feeling in Jim’s narrowed eyes, dark and dead as blacked-out glass. All their games, dragged across half of London. It was how they’d started – Jim as an equal, as someone to be reckoned with, as a threat.

And then, that little voice: _Finally._

\--

A year ago, Sherlock Holmes set up his first murder in a street in Brixton, sat back, put the kettle on inside his apartment, shook the newspaper out on his knee, and waited. 

Lestrade kept it from him for a while. Lestrade wasn’t afraid of him, exactly, but it wasn’t just Sherlock’s petulant temper that kept Lestrade away for the first few days of every case. Perhaps he liked to feel like he had a chance. The sun rose, the tide of the Thames came in, ordinary men had to be given something to hang their hopes on.

“You have to stop doing that,” Lestrade said, out of breath from the stairs.

“I’ll stop once you start getting the facts right,” Sherlock said. He had a nicotine patch on one wrist; he was buzzing. It was warm in the room. 

“It’s not your case.”

“But you’d like me to help you.”

“I haven’t said one word asking you to help.”

“But you’re here.” Sherlock cracked open one eye, caught Lestrade in the doorway with his shoulders down-sloped and uncomprehending. “I’ve just thoroughly embarrassed you in front of an entire press conference and you’re still here. I can’t imagine you dropped in for a cup of tea.”

There was a beat, and then Lestrade admitted it. “No.”

“So you want my help.”

“If you’re inclined to give it, yes. There’s a car waiting.”

Sherlock was out of the door five minutes later. He swept past the police car idling at the curb and flagged down a taxi, the wind blowing his hair forward into his eyes. Ready to take a puzzle of his own construction and unravel it. Sherlock Holmes was brilliant, but still the earth kept turning at the same speed as it used to, the sky stayed standing, nothing changed. Young mothers pushed their strollers on sidewalks and nodded to friends. Taxis idled on the curb. Shopfronts opened, school kids crossed the street without looking at the lights, Mrs Hudson accidentally smashed three of Sherlock’s flasks, people broke into houses and had their houses broken into, the pharmacy ran out of cold medicine. Years passed and passed. Suddenly, Sherlock was thirty-two, without warning. It had been like this forever.

Some nights, looking out of his Baker Street window, Sherlock had thought it. His hands curled on the windowsill like pale spiders in wait. Calling it, calling it, silently. 

_Please, won’t somebody out there just_ see.

\--

The next week, Sherlock flags down a taxi and it explodes before he’s made it inside. Sherlock ends up with metal embedded inside his shoulder, long, shallow burns along the length of his arms, a deep slice on his cheek from a piece of glass that flew past him, narrowly missing his eye. 

The entire charade begins again. The front of 221b Baker Street is cordoned off. Flowers arrive, mostly gardenias, from people Sherlock can’t stand and so he has the nurse throw them out. Jim sends nothing. Lestrade sits down at Sherlock’s hospital bedside, asking questions whenever Sherlock’s awake, and it’s Jim’s little way of proving a point – _without me, this is all you would amount to, Sherlock. Don’t think that I can’t still carry this through._

“Strange thing, though,” Lestrade says as a nurse adjusts Sherlock’s IV. “The bomb under the cab’s bonnet – it wasn’t a traditional bomb. Something that size, you should by all rights be dead.”

“But I’m not,” Sherlock prompts. 

“No. Blast radius was directed _away_ from you. You triggered the device by opening the back passenger door, but it was designed to explode in the opposite direction, toward the driver’s side. The cars in the road caught the brunt of it.”

Sherlock doesn’t open his eyes. “Ingenious.”

“Ingenious? It nearly killed you!”

“Nearly,” Sherlock hums, a strange sort of disappointment settling into his chest. His fingers twitch numbly underneath his dressings. He can almost see Jim’s face, the flashing twist of fury that went nowhere, a singular burst of promise that went unfulfilled. “It could’ve, and it had the potential to. But it didn’t.”

The clock on the wall strikes noon.


End file.
